We Are Bound To Get Ourselves Stuck

Personally, I find much of the swords suit pretty challenging. Do you? They always seem so grim and terrible!

​The Eight of Swords can make you feel like not much could be worse. The woman on the card is bound and blindfolded. She is surrounded by swords, almost imprisoned, but the cage is not complete. There is a fortress or a city behind her, unreachable, high on a cliff. So perhaps she is on a beach and the tide is receding. Maybe she is not in as much peril as she seems to be. Notice one foot is in the water (or hovering above it) and one on land?

These hints tell you that you may be your own worst enemy. Your feelings of isolation and suffering, being cut off or imprisoned by obstacles are largely self imposed. They may not be entirely in your head, but there is a path available for escape and a way to get moving again, should you decide to be open to it.

​What is limiting you? What will it take to get moving again? Consider that there are options you aren’t looking at and that help is at hand if you just ask. This is a time to get out of your head. Plunge that foot into the water and examine your feelings, your intuition about the true state of things and make a decision. You could just stay in this position, but the tide will come in eventually and then you really will be in dire straits!

I especially love Stephanie Pui-Mun Law’s illustration (above) of the Eight of Swords from her Shadowscapes Tarot! The bright hummingbird really underscores the sense that the swan’s imprisonment is temporary and that there is hope if one just looks for it!

The original definitions that came with the deck are myriad and pretty colorful! Hoodwinked in this case, means a literal blindfold as opposed to being tricked. Violent chagrin seems like a bad name for an after shave for goths. And how often do you see trammels (Basically, an obstacle, but power in trammels?) or calumny (slander)?“ A woman, bound and hoodwinked, with the swords of the card about her.Divinatory meanings: Bad news, violent chagrin, crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny----also sickness.Reversed: disquiet, difficulty, opposition, treachery, the unforeseen, fatality.”

This post is a bit belated because I drew this card early Friday morning, started to write and then suddenly feeling exhausted and lulled by the rain, I lay down “just for a minute.” The next thing I knew it was after 5PM and I needed to rush off to work. When that finally wrapped up, I was cold, waterlogged and spent so I listened to an audiobook while I sipped a cup of tea and just gave up.

​It was a day I felt like I just couldn’t do anything! I’ve been wrestling with depression lately. Thursday night I had to deal with a dead battery in the rain and was up late driving to recharge the battery. All week I’ve been running at a deficit. The month ahead looms, threatening me with money concerns. I certainly took a self imposed, “I feel overwhelmed and stuck,” break for the day.

​That's ok, once in a while. But hey, I don’t want to stay that way until I drown!

I'm including images of today's card next to the same card from the Universal Waite deck again. The Centennial deck has a brownish grey sky, while the Universal has a light blue wash which gives the image a much brighter, less gloomy atmosphere.